Olympic Media Guide 5/8/04 - sportcentric

BRITISH SWIMMING - AN OLYMPIC HISTORYCOMPILED BY STUART FARMER MEDIA SERVICES LTDSwimming has been included as an event in every one of the 26 modern Olympiads beginning with the Athens eventin 1896, which was swum on open water in the Bay of Zea, with Women’s distances being included for the first timein Stockholm in 1912.Great Britain first entered a team at the 1900 games in Paris and have only missed competing in the swimming eventsonce since – in St Louis in 1904, when uniquely for the Olympics the events were all swum in a 110 yard pool.The Men’s 100m Freestyle and 400m Freestyle, first swam at the 1896 games, are the oldest events still in theOlympic programme and have been included every year except 1900 in Paris. The Men’s 1500m Freestyle was firstincluded in 1906.The swimming programme settled into a uniform schedule between 1908 and 1952 where in each instance the Menonly swam the 100m, 400m and 1500m Freestyle, the 100m Backstroke, the 200m Breaststroke and the 800m Freestylerelay, with just a 400m Breaststroke event added in 1912 and 1920.Butterfly was first seen at the 1956 games in Melbourne where the men swam the 200m version and the Women swamover 100m. A Medley Relay was added for Rome in 1960, with Tokyo in 1964 seeing the first Individual Medley as wellas a shorter Freestyle Relay. It wasn’t until the Mexico games in 1968 that we saw the first full programme much like itis today, with the only new events introduced since then being the 50m Freestyle for men in Seoul 1988 and for Womenin Atlanta 1996.The Women’s programme has followed a similar route with just two gold medals up for grabs in 1912 and 1920 over100m Freestyle and the 400m Freestyle Relay. Between 1924 and 1952 the ladies only swam the same five events eachtime: 100m and 400m Freestyle, the 100m Backstroke, 200m Breaststroke and the 400m Freestyle Relay.The London games in 1948 saw the first eight lane 50m x 20m pool used at Wembley’s Empire Pool. Elsewhere some ofthe more obscure events from the turn of the century – the 200m obstacle race (where swimmers had to clamber overand under a row of boats), 100m Freestyle for Sailors (which was limited to members of the Greek navy), Underwater(where competitors got points for each metre swum and each second submerged) and the intriguingly titled “Plungefor distance” – are now consigned to history!TEAM GB PERFORMANCEThe following table illustrates the overall performance of the Great Britain swimming team at each Olympic games.It lists the total number of British swimming entries and how they all did in terms of making semi-finals and finalsat each Games. The COMP column denotes the size of the British Team in terms of competitors. Each finalist is thenfurther analysed to show his or her finishing position in the Final with G (gold), S (silver) and B (bronze) denoting thecolour of any medal won. All relay events are listed as one entry per team.As you can see the team has won a total of 62 medals (14 Gold, 22 Silver and 26 Bronze, counting any relay medalsas 1 and not 4) with just under 8% of the total British entries over the years going on to win a medal of some sort.GB has had a further thirty 4th place finishers whilst a total of 215 swimmers have made Olympic Finals (27% of totalentries), and 501 have swum in semi-finals.9